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From September 2018 to April 2019, Sattva undertook a first-of-its-kind study on the everyday giving ecosystem in India, with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies. The study does a comprehensive mapping of the giving ecosystem, including the givers, the NGOs that engage with retail givers, online and offline giving channels, and the enabling ecosystem, their practices, successes and barriers, and provides actionable recommendations into unlocking more potential from India's everyday giver.

Philanthropy in China today is expanding and evolving rapidly. This report presents an overview of the philanthropy ecosystem in China by reviewing existing knowledge and drawing insights from influential practitioners. It also provides an analysis of the key trends, opportunities as well as a set of recommendations for funders and resource providers who are inspired to catalyze a more vibrant and impactful philanthropy ecosystem in China.

This paper looks at some of the most important impacts of the economic sanctions imposed on Venezuela by the US government since August of 2017. It finds that most of the impact of these sanctions has not been on the government but on the civilian population.
The sanctions reduced the public's caloric intake, increased disease and mortality (for both adults and infants), and displaced millions of Venezuelans who fled the country as a result of the worsening economic depression and hyperinflation. They exacerbated Venezuela's economic crisis and made it nearly impossible to stabilize the economy, contributing further to excess deaths. All of these impacts disproportionately harmed the poorest and most vulnerable Venezuelans.
Even more severe and destructive than the broad economic sanctions of August 2017 were the sanctions imposed by executive order on January 28, 2019 and subsequent executive orders this year; and the recognition of a parallel government, which as shown below, created a whole new set of financial and trade sanctions that are even more constricting than the executive orders themselves.
We find that the sanctions have inflicted, and increasingly inflict, very serious harm to human life and health, including an estimated more than 40,000 deaths from 2017–2018; and that these sanctions would fit the definition of collective punishment of the civilian population as described in both the Geneva and Hague international conventions, to which the US is a signatory. They are also illegal under international law and treaties which the US has signed, and would appear to violate US law as well.

Community Food Advocates has just completed a new report of the first year of the Universal School Lunch program, with a deep dive into how the program has worked in high schools - where the students have been the hardest to reach. We visited high schools in all five boroughs, totaling 132 high schools in 54 buildings. We met with school administrators, cafeteria staff and students.
Our visits to high schools helped us identify practices that can promote the program and encourage students to eat school lunch. These findings form the basis of our recommendations to the Chancellor, the Office of Food and Nutrition Services and school administrators.
We are pleased to report that high school students' participation increased by 15.2% - with little public promotion of the program. And high schools with the new Food Court-style cafeteria redesign increased participation by 31%! That is why significantly expanding the number of schools with the cafeteria redesign model remains a high priority for the Lunch 4 Learning Campaign.

Every year, WMO issues a Statement on the State of the Global Climate based on data provided by National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs) and other national and international organizations. For more than 20 years, these reports have been published in the six official languages of the United Nations to inform governments, international agencies, other WMO partners and the general public about the global climate and significant weather and climate trends and events at the global and regional levels.

Despite being one of the most pervasive materials on the planet, plastic and its impact on human health is poorly understood. Human exposure to it grows with increasing plastic production and use. Research into the human health impacts of plastic to date have focused narrowly on specific moments in the plastic lifecycle, from wellhead to refinery, from store shelves to human bodies, and from disposal to ongoing impacts as air pollutants and ocean plastic. Individually, each stage of the plastic lifecycle poses significant risks to human health. Together, the lifecycle impacts of plastic paint an unequivocally toxic picture: plastic threatens human health on a global scale.

In early 2017, ORS Impact evaluated and re-examined the David and Lucile Packard Foundation monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) principles and practice. The purpose of this evaluation was to discover what works well, identify areas for improvement, and stimulate reflection and experimentation. While this report uncovered many examples of strong MEL practice across the Foundation it also highlighted opportunities for improvement. Research findings fed into Foundation decisions to update both internal and external MEL processes and requirements, including refinement of the Foundation's Guiding Principles for MEL.
A key audience of this report include readers wrestling with how to best support MEL in philanthropic settings so that it can support greater learning and impact, such as MEL staff working inside foundations and external evaluators working with foundations.

Around the world, communities are working to take advantage of the technology revolution now propelling the global shift toward an information-based society, in which knowledge is the new capital and higher education is the new machine. Jacksonville, even with some of the necessary machinery in place, needs to build its intellectual infrastructure, which includes everything from improving high school graduation rates to attracting more research dollars into the local economy. Despite the recent rapid growth of the community and its higher education institutions, neither the community nor its colleges and universities have worked together in a strategic, comprehensive way to position Jacksonville for the future.
The Town and Gown study committee began by identifying current and potential roles for both the community and higher education institutions in building the intellectual capacity of Jacksonville. In doing this, the committee reviewed the historical growth of higher education in the community. The committee then examined how higher education institutions were meeting the needs of the local community, and whether the community was supporting those endeavors. Lastly, the study committee identified successful efforts in other communities where strategic collaborations between institutions of higher education and the community have produced tangible results.
The committee found that Jacksonville has reached a critical juncture in its history. Nothing less than the future of the community is in question. On the one hand, the future can be shaped through a deliberate, thoughtful, and intentional focus on building a community that recognizes knowledge and the acquisition of knowledge as a valuable local commodity beneficial to every resident's quality of life. On the other hand, the community (town) and its colleges and universities (gown) can continue growing along separate paths and Jacksonville may lose the opportunity to own its destiny in a world increasingly driven by intellect, ideas, and innovation.
To compete globally and improve its quality of life, the Jacksonville community has to work locally with its higher education institutions to: develop sustained leadership in every sector of the community, including government, business, and higher education, to work towards building Jacksonville's intellectual infrastructure; create and implement a strategic vision that improves the quality of life in all areas of the community by co-opting the teaching, research, and service roles of universities for the betterment of Jacksonville as a whole; and build active collaborations between higher education and community institutions to carry out that vision as well as prepareJacksonville and its residents for meeting the opportunities and the challenges of the 21st century and beyond.

We are proud to present this catalogue as a collection of some of the most promising new solutions in WASH, offering the WASH practitioner community a unique opportunity to access over 30 innovations that could help to solve their most pressing problems.
Over the last few years, we have heavily invested in funding and supporting innovation and research in the WASH sector, highlighting gaps in evidence, exploring the problems, identifying opportunities where innovation can play a vital role, and funding the right people to find potential solutions.
Our WASH Innovation Catalogue is the first of its kind. It offers a unique overview of some of the most promising new solutions in WASH, and is designed to help practitioners decide which innovations could help them solve their most pressing problems. Taking an innovation from idea to scale can take years, and the innovations featured in this catalogue are all at different stages on that journey, but what this offers the WASH sector now is a look at the exciting work happening around the world to address common challenges.

Perhaps the most widely accepted framework for community development and human well-being today is the United Nations' 2030 agenda, more commonly known as the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Agreed to by all 193 member states of the UN, the goals outline international priorities to achieve sustainable human development. As the preeminent guidance on human development, these goals inform the policies of governments, non-governmental organizations, and the UN system.
While the SDGs are certainly more comprehensive than purely economic measures of progress such as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), they place limited emphasis on the value of the natural world. Despite this, animals and their habitats are interwoven in the fate of human development. All species, big and small, imperiled and ubiquitous, have an important role to play in building a healthy, prosperous, and sustainable future for humans. This report will examine these connections and the value of animal welfare and habitat conservation in achieving each sustainable development goal. As we will see, effective animal welfare and conservation can contribute significantly to the achievement of these goals, and promoting animal welfare provides an important avenue to improve both human and animal lives. IFAW seeks to enhance awareness of the connections between animal welfare, conservation, and human development to inspire greater collaboration through which to achieve a shared goal of improving conditions for all species and the planet.